Oh Very Young
by x-HotMess
Summary: He hated that little girl who called him Josephine when he was six years old. JONAS. Joe/Macy


He's six years old and a little girl comes over to sit next to him in the sandbox.

"Hi, I'm Macy. What's your name?" she beams, all wide smiles and dark bangs that are too big for her face, as she begins packing piles of sand together.

"Joe," he mumbles softly, wary of this new creature in the bubblegum pink who's intensely focused on her sandcastle with her tongue between her teeth.

"That's a cute name, is it short for Josephine?" she asks kindly.

His head jerks up in shock. "I'm a boy!"

Her cheeks flush and her smile shortens by a couple of centimetres. "Sorry. You're a very pretty boy."

"I'm not pretty!" he jumps up in protest. "I'm handsome!"

She stands up to face him apologetically, her hand covering her mouth to hold back the giggles that were threatening to erupt. "Yeah, handsome. That's what I meant!"

But her eyes say differently, and his face gets hot in anger. "No you didn't! You thought I was girl! That's so mean, you're a meanie!"

Her grin disappears in a flash, and she looks hurt. "Nuh uh!"

"Yuh huh! Spacy Macy!" he says the first insulting word that rhymes with her name that comes into head, and he feels horrible when her forehead crinkles and her bottom lip start to tremble, but truth be told he's been confused for a girl three times today already and he's sick of it.

"Shut up! You're the meanie!" she screeches, drawing the attention of a couple of other kids in the playground.

"Guys, stop fighting, you'll get in trouble!" a blonde girl jumps into the sandbox and stands between the two of them.

"She called me a girl!" he points an accusing finger at this so-called 'Macy'.

"I said I was sorry!" she protests, crossing her arms across her chest in a huff. "He called me Spacy Macy!"

A curly haired boy holding a tennis ball starts laughing. "Haha, that's a good one, Joe! Spacy Macy, Spacy Macy!" he chants.

"Kevin!" the blonde girl scolds him, but he pokes his tongue out at her.

"Oh, you're not the boss of me, Stella!" he rolls his eyes and goes back to his handball game, but the damage is done. The other spectators of their verbal sparring match have started reciting 'Spacy Macy' as Stella yells at them to be quiet.

"This is all your fault!" Macy bellows at him as she looks bewilderedly from side to side at all the kids taunting her, before mustering up her strength and smacking his shoulder.

"Macy, we _don't_ hit!" Stella gasps as he looks at the arm she pushed in delayed astonishment that such a small girl could pack such a hard punch.

"Ouch!" he cries, glaring back at her before marching over to her sandcastle and stamping on it repeatedly. "Take that, Spacy Macy!"

"Don't call me that!" she screams, launching herself at him amidst Stella's shrieking and the circle surrounding the two fighting children, spurring them on.

So that's how he found himself in the principal's office with a snotty nose and a bloody knee having made his first and only enemy.

* * *

He's sixteen years old and a teenage girl is reaching up to him on the stage from the masses beneath him.

It's the first time he's seen in ten years, after she moved to Vermont at the end of kindergarten. She's no longer the little girl whose face puckered in loathing when she saw him, making a point to stick out her foot every time he walked past. Instead her eyes are wide and shining as he's reaching down into the crowd of screaming girls at one of their first concerts. His fingers touch hers for a split second and he thinks he sees a flash of recognition on her face as her eyebrows draw together and the corners of her mouth turn down, but in an instant it's gone and she's just another ecstatic fan in a crowd of thousands.

When she shows up at Horace Mantis Academy the next week he's filled with a sudden inexplicable fear. Just because he's a superstar now, doesn't mean he's completely out of the range of his grade school bully. He sees Stella greeting her enthusiastically, the filthy traitor, so he stands nervously at his locker across the hall watching them, shifting from foot to foot.

"Do you remember…" Stella turns and points at him, and he gives her a fake smile and a stupid finger wave.

Macy's jaw drops, but it's not because she remembers his name-calling. "OHMYJONAS, YOU'RE JOE LUCAS! AAAAAH I LOVE YOU!!!"

It appears she doesn't remember tormenting you at all.

And so it goes on for months, ducking for cover every time he sees her coming in his direction, covering his ears whenever she catches sight of him. Sometimes he wishes she'd go back to giving him wedgies and throwing mud at his new sweater. She's driving him crazy, popping up in unexpected places, scaring the crap out of him, ripping his clothes to shreds. There's only so much a guy can take, you know?

So she starts walking next to him in the hall one day and starts having a conversation that she's already halfway through and when she abruptly spins around to dreamily watch Nick walk past, she smacks him in the back of the head with her lacrosse stick in the process.

"Augh!" he moans in pain.

"Oh gosh, I'm so sorry!" she giggles, swinging back around and nearly hitting him again, and something inside of him snaps.

"You know what? Just leave me alone, Spacy Macy!" he turns and yells at her.

It's like the sandbox all over again, when her face changes from happy and smiling to utterly devastated in a split second, and his stomach churns in guilt.

"What did you call me?" she whispers.

He stays silent, staring at the ground and wishing it would swallow him whole.

"Wow, I haven't been called Spacy Macy since…" all of a sudden it's like a light bulb has gone off over her head and she narrows her eyes at him with that infamous six year old menace.

"_You!_" she hisses venomously, and he gulps and takes an uneasy step back. "You're that damn kid who stuck me with that stupid nickname in kindergarten!"

"Yeah, well, you called me a girl," he weakly defends himself.

"You knew?" she screeches. "I can't believe you! You remembered me and you still let me fawn all over you like that!"

She looks disgusted with herself and he can't help but feel slightly insulted. "Hey, you're the one who always tripped me over and got me dirty!"

Her jaw drops in indignation. "What are you talking about? You always stepped on my toes on purpose, and you threw my whole lunchbox in the trash can at least three times!"

Oh yeah, he'd forgotten about that.

"You got our entire class to call me Spacy Macy!" she yells, just as Stella and Kevin come walking over to see what all the hoo-hah is about.

"Oh, Macy, you're _still_ hung up on that? That was like, ten years ago!" Stella shakes her head in condescending amusement.

"It's still pretty funny now though," Kevin chuckles, despite Stella and him shaking their heads warningly. "Spacy Macy! Haha, classic."

"I was teased with that every single day for a whole year!" Macy glares at Kevin, before focusing it back on him. "I had to beg my dad to take a job in his Vermont office just to get away from it!"

"Oh, come on, it wasn't that big of a deal," he shrugs nonchalantly, but he can't stand the way his conscience is prodding away at his insides.

"Easy for you to say," she snaps, turning away from him and shoving between Stella and Kevin, who both turn to him and give him a look that says 'Way to go, Joseph'.

"Macy, wait," he sighs, chasing after her, reaching out and grabbing her arm.

"Don't touch me!" she snaps, wrenching out of his grasp. "I hate you!"

"Why, because we happened to torture each other when we were little?" he groans, not understanding how she could be so melodramatic.

"You know that's not it," she snarls, reaching her locker and yanking it open, shoving in her bag and lacrosse stick and pulling out her baseball equipment.

"Well then, what?" he exclaims. "C'mon, Macy, two seconds ago you were my biggest fan!"

"Exactly!" she retorts, pulling a helmet over her ponytail. "You were more than happy letting me fall at your feet, making a complete fool out of myself, and you didn't bother mentioning to me that you once tore the head off my favourite Barbie? You took complete advantage of my obliviousness! Was this just another demented way to get at me? I bet you and your stupid brothers were laughing at me behind my back, weren't you?"

"No, Macy, I would never…!" he protests, but she's already made up her mind.

"Good day, Josephine," she snipes, turning on her heel and storming away, swiping him across the face with the baseball bat slung over her shoulder, and for once she doesn't stop to apologise.

So that's how he found himself in the nurse's office with a split lip and an aching head from his first and only enemy.

* * *

He's twenty one years old and a young woman sits in the chair next to him at his college orientation.

"Hi, I'm Macy. What's your name?" her voice is nervously enthusiastic, like someone who's desperate to make a new friend in a place where they don't know anybody.

He turns his head to look at her in surprise, and as soon as she sees his face it goes blank with shock, before tightening into a scowl.

"You've got to be kidding me," she growls. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Don't you read magazines? Watch TV? JONAS took a hiatus so Kevin, Nick and I could focus on getting a college education without any distractions."

"Oh, really? I didn't know, I stopped following JONAS a long time ago," she replies coolly.

"Of course you did," he rolls his eyes. "Well, Nick's at Harvard doing PoliSci, Kevin got into post-graduate Philosophy at Duke, I'm here doing Anthropology. Why are you here?"

"Well, I, um, got a scholarship, studying Marine Biology. I'm on the varsity ice hockey team," she bites her lip, ready to defend herself at a moment's notice.

He has an unpleasant mental image of her flinging an ice skate at him like a Frisbee of death, slicing his head clean off.

But he shook his head to be rid of the thought and smiled awkwardly at her. "Okay, cool, that sounds really interesting."

"Yeah, it is," she shifts around in her seat, not too sure how to react to the situation either.

"Look, Macy," he turns to look her straight in the eye. "I know we're not on the best terms…"

"You can say that again," she snorts.

"I know we're not on the best terms," he repeats with a teasing smile. "But, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, we both seem like we could use somebody to survive this week with."

"I'm so scared!" she admits, nodding energetically. "I've heard stories about what they do to college freshman. Paddle bats, rights of passage, virgin sacrifices! I'm definitely running in the other direction if that one comes along."

His cheeks redden at this offhand admission, but she seems unfazed and continues. "And you're right, I'm going to need someone to whinge to, even if the last time I spoke to him I knocked him unconscious."

He grimaced at the memory. "Yeah. Nick and Kevin were pretty mad at me for losing our number one fan."

"Well, I _might_ have overreacted a tiny bit," she shrugs.

He laughs and goes to disagree good-naturedly, but the Dean has stepped up on the podium and welcomed them, pointed out the upperclassmen that will be showing them around, have a wonderful time, achieve your dreams, etcetera etcetera, and then they're dismissed. He nudges her arm lightly as they stand to applaud.

"You ready for this?" he grins.

"Absolutely not."

"Me either."

The girls in her dorm come down on her hard because of her association with him. And as for the boys, well, he knew he wasn't going to be the most popular guy from the beginning. Something about being a former popstar with tons of female fans seems to give him a big target on his back. So Macy is there to hose him off after he's tarred and feathered, and he's there to untie her from a tree in the middle of the night, covered in shaving foam.

Then one evening she's trying not to laugh as she pulls at straps of duct tape he's been mummified with, and as she leans forward rip off a clump, he doesn't know what comes over him but her face is so close and she smells like vodka and vanilla and he just wants to see if she tastes like it too, so he softly brushes his lips against hers. She freezes for a fraction of a second, before pushing herself against him and kissing him harder. He doesn't know if it's just her or the fact he's been drinking beer practically non-stop for the last 72 hours, but his head in spinning and his heart is pounding out of his chest and he's never felt this wonderful before.

That is, until there's a loud ripping sound and harsh stinging sears across his skin. He gasps in pain and pulls away to find her smirking at him, holding onto a long strip of duct tape she just pulled off his chest.

"Fffffffuuuuudgesicles!" he squeaks, tears springing up behind his eyes before he can stop them.

"I think that was the worst of it," she laughs, kissing his cheek and dabbing at the corner of his eyes with her thumb. "Come on, don't be such a girl."

"I'm _not_ being a girl!" His eyes narrow resentfully and he grabs the tape out of her hand, sticking it down on her arm before pulling it off brusquely.

"Ow!" she squeals, glowering at him and ripping off another piece, and another, and another.

"Argh! Stop it! Gah! No, enough! AAAH WHY? OW! I hate you!" he cries, wriggling away from her as she tears off the final piece.

"_I_ hate _you_!" she bites back, folding her arms across her chest.

They sit there on her sofa, glaring at each other, her in her oversized t-shirt and pyjama pants, him in nothing but his boxers and smarting, suddenly less hairy skin. The remain like that for a few meagre seconds, before she throws herself at him, pinning him down, but he rolls her off and they're on the ground mingling breaths and tongues and their hands are everywhere, battling for control, but they meet somewhere in the middle and soon enough there's no way either of them are going to be sacrificed now.

'Slow and steady' was never really part of their vocabulary, and although it's usually Nick who falls too hard, too fast, now he's the one can't find the brakes and he's not really sure he wants to, being with her is way too fun, even if it is burning rubber and slightly out of control. So somehow they hit six months together, which is a record for him, and he's out buying flowers for her when an SOS message from Stella pops up on his cell phone.

_Call me as soon as you get this._

He wrinkles his forehead and hits the call button. "Stella, what's wrong?"

"Tell me it's not true!"

He can feel his stomach trying to climb out of his throat at the disappointment in her voice. "What's not true?"

"Don't play dumb with me!" Stella snaps. "Did you or did you not have a private rendezvous with a buxom blonde yesterday afternoon?"

"What?" he chokes.

"I'm reading it off TMZ right now, Joe, they have pictures and everything! Please tell me you're not cheating on Macy!"

"Stella! You know I'm not the kind of person who would do that!" he grumbles sourly, partly out of the irritation that he's never going to escape celebrity. "Meg is my biology tutor. She's gay."

"Oh," her tone indicates there's something she's not telling him, which only worries him more.

"Stella?" he growls. "What did you do?"

"Well…" she sighs. "I may have already called Macy."

He hangs up on her without another word and goes over to Macy's as fast as he can. He bursts in the door, panting, to find her standing in the kitchen over a saucepan of boiling water.

"Hey babe," she grins at him.

He's a little taken aback by her lack of reaction by there's no time to analyse it because he has to explain himself right away. "She's a lesbian!"

"What?" she laughs at his sudden, seemingly random outburst.

"I know Stella called you, and told you about the pictures, but it's not… I would never…" he pauses and gasps for breath.

She just smiles knowingly and shakes her head, pushing a bowl towards him over the island. "Here, try this."

"Huh?" he stares at her in bemusement.

"I want you to come over here, put some of this in your mouth, savour it, swallow it, then tell me what you think," she gives him a weird look before emptying some pasta into the bubbling pot.

He walks over to the counter cautiously, smelling the contents of the bowl. "It's not poisoned, is it?"

She rolls her eyes and sticks her finger in, scooping some out and sucking it off her finger slowly to prove him wrong. "It's a seafood sauce I made for dinner. I want to know if you actually like it before I make the effort to serve it to you."

He spoons a small amount into his mouth, before his eyes light up and he eats a considerably larger dollop. "Mmmm," he hums in contentedly delicious satisfaction.

"I'll take that as an affirmative?" she raises her eyebrows and he nods enthusiastically, going to take another spoonful, but she snatches it away with lightening reflexes. "Oh no you don't, I need some left over for the pasta!"

He swallows and gazes at her confusedly as she bustles around, preparing bowls and cutlery. "Hey, Macy?"

"Yuh huh?" she smiles at him over her shoulder.

"Stella called you, correct?" he was going to kill her if she made him freak out over nothing when he could have explained it in his own time.

"Yeah, she was spazzing about your biology tutor," she shrugs one shoulder as she the stirs the nearly cooked pasta.

"So… you're not mad?" he bites his lip and waits for her response, because if Macy is anything, she's unpredictable.

"Why would I be mad?" she turns to face him with a cheeky grin. "Please, Josephine, like you'd have the balls to try and cheat on me."

He opens his mouth angrily to argue, but she cuts him off with a giggle and a kiss, like she can read his mind. "I'm kidding, Joe. I trust you more than anyone."

His heart lightens considerably and he pulls her close once again, melting into her lips, sliding his hands around her waist and digging them into the back pockets of her jeans. She lingers for a few seconds before trying to take a step back. He just grunts in protest and follows her lead, his mouth never leaving hers.

"You taste like seafood sauce," he mutters against her lips. "You'll be a great marine biologist if you can make all the animals you study taste like that."

She lets out a burst of laughter, breaking away and punching his shoulder playfully, and he only lets himself cringe in pain when she turns her back to stir the pasta one final time because she's still a little girl with a fist of steel. But as she twirls around to stir through the sauce, she freezes and has to do a double take.

"Joe," she murmurs uncertainly. "You would have told me if you were allergic to anything, right?"

"Yeah," he shrugs nonchalantly, but now that he thinks about it his lips have been tingling weirdly ever since she first kissed him. "Why?"

"Um…" her finger encircles her face hesitantly, and he prods at his own cheek in confusion.

He's even more confused to find that it's puffy and throbs a little when he touches it. He throw a glance at her, she looks like she's torn between having a panic attack and rolling on the floor with laughter. He pushes himself off the kitchen island and sprints to look at himself in the hall mirror.

"AAAAAAHHH!" he screams at the sight of his inflamed face. "W-wh-whaaat? Macy! Help!"

She appears at his shoulder and rubs comforting circles on his back. "Why didn't you tell me you were allergic to seafood?"

"I didn't know, did I?" he screeches. "I hardly ever eat it!"

He looks to her for a little more sympathy, but she's biting down on her and her shoulders are shaking and her eyes are watering with bottled laughter.

"This isn't funny, Macy! Look at my face!"

"I know, I know, your beautiful face, woe is you!" she giggles, grabbing her car keys in one hand and his wrist in the other. "Guess we'll have to save the anniversary dinner for another time."

"Would you still love me if I looked like this forever?" he's in panic mode and fishing for compliments, but he doesn't realise the meaning of his words until they've already slipped out.

She pauses, before lifting his hand to her cheek and kissing the inside of his wrist. "Joe, honey, I'd have to love you in the dark," she teases.

So that's how he found himself in the emergency room with a swollen face and a mouth full of anti-histamines, head over heels for his first and only enemy.

* * *

_I love JONAS, it's surprisingly funny, esp. Nick J in that tiger outfit…oooh baby. Love that kid :) But yeah, Joe and Macy seem cute together in my head, so I couldn't help myself. Didja like it? __**Review**__! _


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